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Literary Review
Wait in a limbo
SHEILA KUMAR
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A banal tale told in dismally banal style.
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The Waiting Room; Anupa Mehta; Penguin; Rs 195.
Reading the book is rather like sitting in a waiting room, and waiting. Waiting for progress of some sort, a conclusion, a closure. And realising far too late, that the holding room is in a state of permanent suspension …i.e., the reader is doo
med to a wait in limbo.
The premise is promising, though. It deals with a free- spirited young woman Maya, as seen through the eyes of the narrator Aniket, a man who has loved her unrequitedly for years. Through Aniket, we find that Maya has been seeing a psychiatrist called Nayan. It is the doctor’s waiting room that forms the title… and nothing more…of the book. The far-from-good doctor, though built up to be some sort of Rasputin, comes through as a singularly unprepossessing fellow, shabby in dress and social mores, unscrupulous and shady in his professional mode.
Story of exploitation
And so what the reader gets is a story of exploitation, mental and physical, of Maya and a host of other women. However, the narrative moves in fits and starts; details are sparse at times, then seem to be hastily added on at other times. At yet other times, there is a flood of detail, including a Brian Weiss-like set of regression sessions, which only adds to the general confusion.
The writing style, too, does not flow too smoothly. Sentences like “swimming in the goo of infatuation”, “we parked our derrieres”, emotions likened to puke, archaic terms like “we chit-chatted”, and my favourite: “the sweet myrrh of general anaesthesia”, keep popping up. Maya keeps mentioning that her husband Samar is young but we never do find out if she is older to him. The shrink is perpetually morose then suddenly, mid-book, he transforms into a gregarious social being.
Basically, a series of incidents serve to propel this lacklustre story forward; then, along come gratuitous speed bumps and the plot falls apart, only to pick itself up a while later. Some typos in the text don’t help either.
One odd detail sticks in the reviewer’s mind. The danseuse Chitra Visweshwaran has been mentioned. One wonders if she knows. Then, one is not too sure if the heroine of the novella is impelled to expose the perfidious doctor out of an understandable desire for vengeance or an altruistic desire to help his other victims. One also wonders if the author has written a revenge story sourced from real life. A banal tale told in dismally banal style.
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